"Children Are Helpless": Eighteenth-Century Children's Literature and Disability

Physical independence is a resonant issue for children's literature. Although children's literature celebrates childhood, it also celebrates growth. It aims to teach young readers how to leave behind the child's dependance on other people for guidance and support, including help with essential aspects of self-care and mobility. In addition to grander milestones in emotional and cognitive development, children's literature celebrates toddlers discovering they can walk on their own and little children learning to dress themselves. A fact of early childhood, physical dependence is also an endlessly rich source of ideas about the self and its relation to other people. A need for assistance with self-care or mobility can associate disability with childhood even today—an association that disability rights activists attack. Writers such as Harriet McBryde Johnson assert instead the principle that an adult's need for help with any specific life function does not diminish that person's more general right to moral, personal, and political autonomy. Such a need should not, in effect, move an adult into the category of "child."

This contested set of ideas about independence, age, and disability has a great variety of sources.¹ This essay will focus on the association of personal assistance with a stigmatized state of childish dependency in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century history of children's literature itself. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and Mary Wollstonecraft, foundational writers for and about children, share a particularly impassioned commitment to the ideal of physical independence. Their way of thinking about this ideal was important to the eighteenth-century middle class audience that supported the rise of children's literature as a commercially viable enterprise. These writers represent physical impairment through emotionally charged images of dependency that highlight, by contrast, a fantasy of complete individual independence. The appeal of this fantasy remains strong today.²

The first section of this essay will examine how Locke, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft turned whole, healthy bodies into images of perfect autonomy, and non-normative bodies into the opposite—images of the helplessness of perpetual childishness. The second section will offer, as a contrast, a text in which this trope collides with the need to represent an actual person who lived with a physical impairment: Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson. Robert Southey's best-selling Life of Horatio Nelson (1813) was an early counter-example to the metaphorically-charged representation of normative and non-normative bodies in writing for young people. Southey's biography was written for and marketed to boys destined to go to sea. Nelson's celebrity required Southey to represent with some degree of accuracy to this audience certain well-known facts about his hero: Nelson achieved his famous victories with a body that was neither healthy nor whole, and with the enthusiastic use of personal assistance from others.

I. "Healthful Both to Mind and Body"

According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Children's Book Center, only 3.4% of the Young Adult and children's books received from U.S. publishers in 2019 featured a protagonist or important secondary character with a disability ("The CCBC's Diversity Statistics"). Moreover, Isobel Brittain's 2004 list of "The Six Pitfalls of Disability Fiction" remains unfortunately relevant to the quality of many of these representations. While some writers strive to accurately describe the life of a given young person that includes impairment, fanciful or melodramatic depictions of mental and physical disability endure and continue to serve as metaphors for a range of emotionally fraught ideals and fears. This essay will argue that this pattern of exclusion and misrepresentation has a long history, one that goes back to the origins of what M. O. Grenby calls "respectable" children's literature. In contrast to the even longer history of jestbooks, chapbooks, and other cheap print read by the semi-literate of all ages, respectable children's literature began in the eighteenth century and targeted an emerging market of ambitious middle-class parents.³ And from the beginning, this market was deeply concerned with issues of health and personal independence. Older ways of representing disability persisted. For example, the casual or elaborately cruel jokes of the jestbooks that Simon Dickie describes in Cruelty and Laughter lived on throughout the century, as did the fashionable discourse of sensibility that represented people with mental or physical impairments as objects designed to trigger the observer's tears and charity. This essay concentrates, however, on physical independence and physical dependence in terms particular to respectable children's literature as a genre.

Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile set out ideas about disability that would strongly influence eighteenth century writing for and about children. As Teresa Michals and Claire McTiernan point out, Rousseau starts by acknowledging the fact that some children are born with non-normative, "ill-constituted" bodies—and declares that he will not educate these children: "I would not take on a sickly and ill-constituted child, were he to live until eighty. I want no pupil useless to himself and others … Let another in my stead take charge of this invalid. I consent to it and approve his charity… "(53). Rousseau implies that a man who spends his time teaching such a child not only wastes his time, but also disrupts gender and professional identities: "He who takes charge of an infirm and valetudinary pupil changes his function from governor to male nurse." Education cannot improve the sickly, because weak bodies make weak souls: "the weaker the body, the more it commands; the stronger it is, the more it obeys. … All the sensual passions lodge in effeminated bodies. … A frail body weakens the soul." The body is the servant of the soul, and a weak servant is nothing but trouble: "The body must be vigorous in order to obey the soul. A good servant ought to be robust" (Rousseau 53).

With the added interest of sensual passions, effeminacy, and master/servant imagery, here Rousseau echoes the celebrated opening of John Locke's Thoughts Concerning Education:

A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this world… He, whose mind directs not wisely, will never take the right way; and he, whose body is crazy and feeble, will never be able to advance in it. … The consideration I shall here have of health, shall be, not what a physician ought to do with a sick and crazy child; but what the parents, without the help of physick, should do for the preservation and improvement of an healthy, or at least not sickly constitution in their children.

(Locke 10)

So, the opening gesture of both these foundational educational texts is to exclude a significant number of children from their pool of potential pupils, on the grounds that a weak body will effeminize and sensually corrupt—or, more blandly, defeat—the greatest mind or soul.

Once the naturally sick are out of the way, both Locke and Rousseau proceed to identify good health with a moral life. If you are not born sickly, they argue, then any sickness you develop is caused by immoral choices, choices made by yourself or by others. Mothers and nurses make children sickly by coddling them. Locke claims that "most children's constitutions are either spoil'd, or at least harm'd, by cockering and tenderness." Prime examples of coddling are the following: worrying about children's wet feet, bundling them up in warm great coats in winter, not trusting Nature about how much sleep they should get, and cramming them with specially delicate foods and medicines. In addition, men make themselves sick by choosing to indulge in unnatural luxuries, such as soft feather beds (which, according to Rousseau, damage the kidneys).

Mary Wollstonecraft's translation from the German of Christian Salzmann's Elements of Morality for the Use of Children uses Locke and Rousseau's equation of good health with virtue in ways that I believe are common in books for and about children aimed at the socially ambitious middle-class household. Wollstonecraft's preface pithily sums up the habit of moralizing health: "health and every other blessing of life arises only from good conduct" (Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children; with an Introductory Address to Parents. Translated from the German of the Rev. C.G. Salzmann. xiii). Domestic pleasure, the ideal of middle-class family life, is "healthful both to mind and body"; other kinds of pleasures bring "weariness and pain of body" (xix). In a particularly unkind example of this way of thinking, the good mistress of a household tells her maid that the "pimples on your face expose your gluttony." Sure enough, the housemaid admits that she has been obsessively gobbling the family's supply of preserved cherries (124). At the other end of the social scale, Sir William, the collection's featured sickly aristocrat, clearly has brought his "various complaints" on himself by his late-night parties and other luxuries. Moreover, in the world of Elements of Morality, not merely pimples and dizzy spells, but also amputation, are caused by bad behavior. A pathetic one-armed beggar tells his story: "My father and mother were always desiring me to be careful. Child, child, my father would say, pray do not climb up such dangerous places." Hunting a bird's nest, he disobeys, with predictable results: "I broke my poor arm—my right arm!" Black with gangrene, the arm is cut off: "It was a dreadful operation; and afterward, they took a red-hot iron and held it to the part, to stop the bleeding. So I became a cripple!" (73).

According to Rousseau, a moral life leads to the greatest good possible to man (although not to woman): independence. Aside from the massive exception of sexual desire, Rousseau's happy man will be independent of all other human beings, physically as well as intellectually. This is the principle guiding Emile's education: a man's happiness, we are told, depends on his ability to be entirely "self-sufficient" or to "dispense with the help of others" (236). Addressing the everyday experience of social class, the children's books that followed often urge their readership of "little masters" and "misses" to grow up by achieving physical independence from servants, in contrast to the sickly aristocrat's dependence on them. That is, these books teach that the healthy middle-class adult is independent and proud of it, while sick people and children—and aristocrats, who are both sickly and childish—are dressed and coddled by servants. And such childish and sickly people ought to be ashamed of themselves.

This idealization of physical independence sat uncomfortably with the actual role that servants played in dressing, feeding, and otherwise helping with the daily life of both these children and their parents—as well as their social superiors. In Emile, Rousseau sets out the template for the conflation of childhood and disability through physical dependence on other people, including dependence on servants. He attacks the glamour of personal attendance, claiming instead that the truly admirable man should be independent of others—physically, as well as morally and intellectually. He describes bodily health itself as a "kind of virtue." Rousseau criticizes a lazy little boy who "had got it into his head that a man of his rank need … do nothing, that his birth would serve as a substitute for arms and legs, as well as for every kind of virtue" (468). In a sense, he accuses this lazy little boy of high rank of wanting to be an amputee, with prosthetic servants substituting for his arms and legs. Peculiar as this image may seem, Carolyn Steedman suggests that the idea of servants as prosthesis was an eighteenth-century commonplace. Because the master was thought to own the servant's labor, "jokes were made about the servant as a kind of extra limb, or prosthesis, of the employer. Much painful fun was had … "(Steedman 18). The dead metaphor of the "hired hand" remains familiar today.

Like other remarkable moments in Emile, this call to be physically self-sufficient was often reworked in terms of gender. For example, Maria Edgeworth's progressive child-rearing manual Practical Education also tries very hard to reframe the traditional prestige of being dressed by servants as a kind of shameful dependence. Like many such books, it devotes an entire chapter to "Servants." Citing Rousseau, Edgeworth writes that well brought-up children "should not be waited upon as being masters and misses, they should be assisted as being helpless (*Rousseau). They will not feel their vanity flattered by this attendance; … they will be ambitious of independence, and they will soon be proud of doing everything for themselves" (Edgeworth). While Rousseau held that independence defined the happy man, and dependence defined the happy woman, for Edgeworth, both boys and girls must learn independence. Nobody should enjoy the experience of being helped to get dressed in the morning.

Similarly, in her Original Stories from Real Life, Mary Wollstonecraft attacks the kind of pride that she assumes little mistresses as well as little masters feel in being attended by servants. Wollstonecraft devotes a chapter to the important issue of "Behaviour to Servants" (XII), a chapter that focuses on defining independence. Overall, the book is remarkably open about the pleasures of possessing superior physical strength. Who can forget Mrs. Mason's response when the two small girls under her care are tempted to squash bugs and worms? "You are often tiresome—I am stronger than you—yet I do not kill you," she coolly remarks (Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. By Mary Wollstonecraft 5). Some twenty-first-century writers question seeing dependency as the essence of childhood itself, striving to focus more fully on the developing agency of children, rejecting a simple opposition between the adult's omnipotence and the child's helplessness. While writers today may strive to reject a "narrow focus on dependency and vulnerability" when thinking about childhood (Appell 34), such dependency and vulnerability are Wollstonecraft's point—in particular, the dependency and vulnerability of young ladies and young gentlemen.

Mrs. Mason argues that the physical dependence of children makes them the moral inferiors rather than the superiors of the servants who wait on them. For example, little Mary asserts the power over a servant that is part of her status as a lady: "I wonder at your impertinence, to talk thus to me—do you know who you are speaking to?" Mrs. Mason checks Mary's rudeness by convincing her that she is, in fact, not powerful but rather powerless. Mary's small, weak body is more important than her elite status: "she was going on; but Mrs. Mason interrupted her, and answered the question—to a little girl, who is only assisted because she is weak. Mary shrunk back abashed" (102). Mary is abashed, but Mrs. Mason drives the lesson home: "Children are helpless. I order my servants to wait on you, because you are so" (104). And again: "I heard you insult a worthy servant. … you could not so soon have forgotten that you were a weak, dependent being" (107).

As we might expect from a creation of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mrs. Mason does acknowledge the ethical problems raised by giving such importance to physical strength, noting that bodily strength really should take second place, morally speaking, to the gift of reason. She even claims that it is reason, properly educated and conscientiously exercised, that brings true independence: "children are inferior to servants—who act from the dictates of reason … it is the proper exercise of our reason that makes us in any degree independent" (102). Overall, however, "Behaviour to Servants" stresses the shameful physical dependence of middle-class children in the day-to-day business of life: "you would find yourself very helpless without the assistance of men and women—unable to cook your meat, bake your bread, wash your clothes, or even put them on—such a helpless creature is a child—I know what you are, you perceive" (106). Through equating health and morality, respectable children's writers also use health to re-imagine social status. Like Rousseau, they attack the traditional aristocratic prestige of personal attendance by framing the master/servant relationship in terms of sickness rather than status. That is, they present personal attendance as a shameful mark of invalidism rather than a privilege of aristocratic power.

Such writing reflects complicated ideas about the body, and also about servants. Servants were not all equal. An eighteenth-century household with any pretense to gentility would have at least one to two very hard-worked, probably female, live-in servants, and charwomen brought in to help out.⁴ No one writing for a middle-class audience, children's authors included, can seriously imagine doing without these kind of servants, however devoted they may be to ideas of personal independence. In contrast, a manservant (especially in livery and a wig) was a sign of very high social position indeed, one rarely found outside of an aristocratic household, especially in or around London. That is, manservants were in fact quite rare—but they dominate eighteenth-century rhetoric about servants, especially in the context of the moral debate over "luxury." Steedman explains that writers tended to substitute "imagined men in powdered wigs" for all the actual young women scrubbing floors. For anyone interested in attacking older forms of social privilege, manservants were an irresistible target. I would suggest there that they were also a scapegoat for ambivalence about dependence in general.

II. "One Is Yet Wanting"

The sheer familiarity of Horatio's Nelson's body in monuments, histories, and biography may obscure its value as a counter-example to the kind of ableist stereotypes discussed above. With his eighteen-foot statue looming over Trafalgar Square at the top of its enormous column, Nelson may seem an odd candidate for historical recovery. Moreover, recent attention to his support for West Indian slavery raises questions about his status as a national icon.⁵ Finally, the shadow of the G. A. Henty and W. E. Johns' tales of derring-do looms over war stories for children, implying they are merely "boys' adventure stories," rigidly-gendered fast-paced entertainment featuring heroes whose physical invulnerability takes fantasies about the human body to a new extreme. It is in this context that Robert Southey's popular Life of Horatio Nelson (1813) rewards attention. Like Nelson's body itself, the significance of Southey's popular biography of Nelson for the history of children's literature may be hiding in plain view. It was written before the Victorian boys' adventure story became a staple of children's literature, and it features a military hero whose body contradicts ableist stereotypes about physical norms.

In the context of reception history and children's literature, Southey's Life is a good example of how generic boundaries shift over time. Although published for an audience of boys, the Life is now associated with naval historians rather than young readers. It also reminds us that later assumptions about children's literature may simplify our sense of the range of what was published in a given era. As Ann Dowker points out, twentieth-century readers' own preferences have shaped current perceptions of nineteenth-century children's literature, including its representation of disability. Books that are now generally considered to be "children's classics" tend to contain familiar tropes. That is, readers may select for and help to keep in print works that reflect a still-popular way of thinking, such as the moralization of good health. However, books that were popular in their day, but that are now either out of print or not classified as children's literature, may portray disabled characters in ways that are "more complex and varied." Harriet Martineau's The Crofton Boys (1841) is one example of a book that departs from the moralization of healthy, whole bodies described above. Southey's Life is another.

As a story about a military hero written for the children of England's middle class during the Napoleonic Wars, Southey's Life is a rarity. Remarkably, during the very decades when England was awash with wartime propaganda and often under direct threat of invasion, the children's books marketed to middle-class parents were largely silent about these matters. As M. O. Grenby has demonstrated, in England, "an imaginative war literature for children developed only after Waterloo" (55). Grenby makes an important point about the strategic silence of children's literature during the war years: the genre is "anti-enlistment rather than anti-war." More recently, war stories for children have taken on a range of ethical questions, and Letitia Barbauld's "Things By Their Right Names" is one interesting early example of this kind of questioning.⁶ Nevertheless, at a time when boys could legally become combatants, enlistment in the early teens was not the goal most book-buying parents had in mind for most of their sons. That is, rather than questioning the ethics of war or articulating pacifist principles, when children's literature did mention battle it generally offered a practical reason to discourage sons from running off and signing up. Overall, rather than focusing on the ethical questions raised by combat, most children's literature simply offered a vision of the good life that left war out entirely. It was dedicated to routing boys away from the dangerous glamour of military life, and toward another sort of future: a long education, professional success, and virtuous, healthy domesticity.

Published two years before Waterloo, Southey's Life of Horatio Nelson (1813) stands out amid this dearth of war stories for children. Although Southey reached a wide audience, his primary target was a certain kind of child reader: the literate boys who went to sea in the Royal Navy's ships, often by the age of twelve. "Many lives of Nelson have been written," his preface explains, but "one is yet wanting clear and concise enough to become a manual for the young sailor, which he may carry about with him till he has treasured up the example in his memory and in his heart." While Southey's Life of Nelson was not an educational treatise like Emile or Thoughts on Education, it belonged to the same market as didactic fiction shaped by these treatises. Southey shared such works' goal of helping child readers achieve professional success. Southey's reference in his preface to "the young sailor" was not a mere rhetorical flourish. He wanted to write "such a life of Nelson as shall be put into the hands of every youth destined for the navy," and John Murray, his publisher, produced a number of illustrated pocket editions for this market (Knight 542). The Life was eventually reprinted in the Family Library, a descendent of the kind of middle-class domestic reading that Barbauld pioneered with Evenings at Home (1793). It was annotated for use in the classroom for a wider population of students. It is possible to reconcile Southey's Life's niche-market status with the general "anti-enlistment" pattern that Grenby describes. Although middle-class families discouraged runaway military adventures for their sons, some of them planned for some of their sons to pursue the goal of professional success in the military. Compared to other professions, the Royal Navy was particularly cheap to enter. The usual didactic stories promoting thrift, industry, and love of home were not appropriate for these boys, who were intended to seek their fortunes at sea.

In the context of the children's literature of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, Southey's Life offers an unusual message about the body, disability, and social class. It stands in contrast to the equation of good morals with good health that eighteenth and early nineteenth-century children's books more commonly present. Moreover, it contradicts the ideal vision of the adult middle-class body that these books advocate, the fantasy of total physical independence articulated by Locke and Rousseau. As a biography rather than a work of fiction, it is obliged to address the well-known facts of its subject's life, awkward as some of those were in the context of the values of respectable children's literature. How Southey deals with the fact that Nelson publicly abandoned his virtuous and amiable wife—an unimpeachably domestic woman—to throw himself into the arms of the scandalous Emma Hamilton, is a subject for another essay. The focus here is the other thing that everybody knew about Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson's body: his right arm was lost in battle early in his career. Nelson's body differed unmistakably from the heroic military ideal of masculine invulnerability that would eventually dominate the genre of the boy's adventure story as it was popularized by G. A. Henty. Southey had to represent disability.

Here are some of the familiar facts that Southey worked with in his biography. Like many navy officers of his generation, Horatio Nelson joined his first ship at the age of twelve. More remarkably, before he turned forty, Nelson had fought in over 120 engagements, losing in battle the sight in one eye as well as his right arm. He fought and won his three great battles, the Nile (1798), Copenhagen (1801), and Trafalgar (1805), as a disabled active-duty officer—as a one-armed, half-blind admiral who was working at the very peak of his administrative genius, technical expertise, and charismatic leadership. He destroyed Napoleon's navy and saved England from invasion, then was killed by a sniper's bullet in the midst of the battle of Trafalgar, thanking God that he had done his duty.

By the terms of his own project, Southey was obliged to represent disability in a way that plausibly presented Nelson as a figure that every boy intended for a career at sea would want to admire and to imitate. His purpose ruled out the kind of traditional jest-book ridicule that Simon Dickie has described. Presenting a physically disabled man as a role model for middle-class boys also contravened the discourse of sensibility popular in children's literature. Southey could not represent Nelson as an object to stimulate the able-bodied observer's pity, or to dramatize a lesson about avoiding vicious behavior and the natural consequence of vicious behavior, ill-health. Nelson had lost his arm while defending his country. Pictures and statues of him that included his empty right sleeve were a reminder that in the eighteenth century, battle-related injury—not falls while birds-nesting or other naughty behavior—was the leading cause of amputation.

In addition to being an amputee, Nelson's body differed in other conspicuous ways from the ideal body advocated by the official children's literature of his own day, suggesting very different claims about virtue, health, and independence than those popular in respectable children's literature. Nelson was sickly. He was short, slight, concussed, herniated, and subject to recurring bouts of malaria. He got sea-sick in bad weather. Contemporary observers and historians today agree that he generally did not present an image of masculine invulnerability: "Nelson is one of the most insignificant figures I ever saw … a more miserable collection of bones and wizened frame cannot be imagined," noted one observer (Knight 48). Rather than implying that good health causes virtue, or that virtue causes good health, Southey contrasts the two in telling Nelson's story. While the authors we have considered here claim that a weak body corrupts the soul, Southey draws on a quite opposite formulation often used to describe Nelson, one written on the back of portrait by Benjamin Robert Hayden: "NELSON a little body with a Mighty Heart" (Nelson Copy 51). In the same sentence in which he introduces Nelson's sickly body, Southey hastens to bring in the mighty heart: "Nelson was never of a strong body … yet he had already given proofs of that resolute heart and nobleness of mind which, during his whole career of labour and of glory, so eminently distinguished him." In this account, the prestige of Nelson's achievements clearly outweighs the prestige of health.

Like Rousseau and Locke, Southey begins his tale by describing a sickly child, one who is marked by a weak constitution: Horatio Nelson, he writes, "was never of a strong body; and the ague, which at that time was one of the most common diseases in England, had greatly reduced his strength." However, Nelson's uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling, departs from Rousseau and Locke's first principle of education. He puts aside his scruples and agrees to take the sickly Horatio to sea with him, come what may: "What," said [Captain Suckling] in his answer, "has poor Horatio done, who is so weak, that he, above all the rest, should be sent to rough it out at sea?—But let him come; and the first time we go into action, a cannon-ball may knock off his head, and provide for him at once." Southey keeps a running tally of the imperfectly healed wounds, recurring conditions, limb loss, and episodes of general ill health that framed Nelson's career, parallel with a running tally of his key victories. He retells with approval Nelson's apocryphal joke to a navy clerk who wondered out loud about how little "smart-money," or financial compensation, was due him for the damage to his sight. "Oh!" replied Nelson, "this is only for an eye. In a few days I shall come for an arm, and in a little longer, God knows, most probably for a leg." Nelson's death at the moment of victory at Trafalgar is the logical end-point of this story of military heroism understood as a combination of bodily weakness and bodily self-sacrifice.

Moreover, in contrast to children's books' usual idealization of independence, Southey foregrounds Nelson's physical dependence on others. He reverses the children's writers' negative representation of elite social status as invalidism, effeminacy, and childishness. Instead, he positively describes Nelson's devoted male subordinates taking care of their one-armed, half-blind, perpetually sickly and perpetually victorious admiral as if he were a child. "I require nursing like a child" (177), Nelson flatly states. At sea, Nelson is surrounded by male nurses. His subordinates systematically indulged in exactly the kind of coddling that Locke and Rousseau attack nursemaids and mothers for inflicting. Whatever ship Nelson happened to be on, its officers and any nearby captains nursed him. They fussed over his wet feet and urged him to wear his greatcoat. They worried about what he ate and how little he slept. They made him drink warm milk each morning and encouraged him to suck on lozenges: "Never was any commander more beloved" (182). Although this image of a male military hero as a beloved and cossetted child may seem out of line with gender norms today, a modern biographer draws the same picture as Southey: "Devoted officers watched [Nelson] as if he had been an infant. He awoke each morning between four and five to warm milk prescribed by [Captain] Foley … He took lozenges contributed by [Captain] Murray … in the fleet 'everybody [was] devoted and kind to me in the extreme…" (Sugden 468).

Finally, in describing his hero being nursed "like a child," Southey idealizes master/servant relationships instead of attacking them. He incorporates disability into traditional ideas about social status. As there is nothing shameful about the great admiral's physical weaknesses, there is nothing shameful about all the ways that his subordinates take care of him. Nelson is openly dependent not only on his officers, in fact, but also on his manservant—and the reader is clearly supposed to be charmed by this fact. Anecdotes about Nelson's subordinates ganging up on him out of worry for his health, sometimes enlisting the "authority" of his manservant Tom Allen, to get him to obey, have rhetorical power because of the authority Nelson held over them all. These are anecdotes about the gentleman's privilege of being bullied by his valet. For example, here they all are in Southey's description of the suspenseful eve of the Battle of Copenhagen:

The incessant fatigue of body as well as mind which Nelson had undergone during the last three days had so exhausted him that he was earnestly urged to go to his cot [by his officers], and his old servant, Allen, using that kind of authority which long and affectionate services entitled and enabled him to assume on such occasions, insisted upon his complying.

(152)

While obediently lying in his cot as ordered by his manservant, Nelson continued to dictate orders to his fleet on how best to capture, burn, sink, or otherwise destroy his enemies. Although well-authenticated, this story is part of a large genre of manservant-bullying-his-master stories. Allen embroidered and trafficked in them for decades after Nelson's death. For example, he insisted that he protected Nelson in battle by forbidding him to wear his many military decorations, thus making him a less conspicuous target: "When he was going into action he used to say, 'Tom, I shall put on that coat,' (meaning the one decorated with his orders,) and I used to answer, 'no, my Lord, you won't,'—and when the battle was over,—'There, now, don't you think this coat looks better than if it was drilled through with bullets?'" ("Nelson, His Valet, and His Native Coast," United Services Magazine, 202). Although this story about the coat is unlikely to be true, another story about Allen protecting Nelson in battle is well-authenticated. "Under fire from the forts of Valette, which hulled the ship, and knocked away our foretopmast, this faithful servant interposed his bulky form between those forts and his little master … this affectionate domestic watched his lordship with unceasing attention" (Parsons 250). Paternalist rather than anti-aristocratic, these stories are meant to honor both the "little master" and his "affectionate domestic." Unlike the heroes of the wider canon of eighteenth-century children's literature, there is no need for this little master to be ambitious of independence.

No one book can meet the need for a full range of accurate representations of the diversity of human experience and human possibility in children's literature. In terms of race, class, and gender, Southey's Life is one more story about a kind of person whose story has already been told many times. Claiming this particular war story for the study of disability, however, foregrounds its departures from familiar formulas about bodies and heroism. In 2004, Isabel Brittain usefully listed "The Six Pitfalls of Disability Fiction," six stereotypes that even contemporary authors with progressive intentions still struggle to escape:

1. 1. Portraying the character with an impairment as "other" than human … extremely "evil" or "good"; Likening the character to vegetable matter; Forging links between the character and animals.

2. 2. Portraying the character with an impairment as "extra-ordinary": The character's ordinary humanity is not described but is represented either as a negative or positive stereotype.

3. 3. The "second fiddle" phenomenon: The character with an impairment is neither the central character within the narrative nor fully developed, merely serving to bring the central character/s to a better understanding of themselves or disability.

4. 4. Lack of realism and accuracy in the portrayal of the impairment: The author neglects to properly research a particular impairment resulting in inaccuracy of portrayal.

5. 5. The outsider: The character with an impairment is portrayed as a figure of alienation and social isolation.

6. 6. Happy endings: The author fails to see a happy and fulfilled life being a possibility for a character with an impairment.

In terms of this list, Southey's Nelson holds up surprisingly well. He is not linked to animals, vegetables, angelic or demonic forces, but rather is entirely and unquestionably human. He plays second fiddle to no one. His impairment and its effects are accurately portrayed, and he is a fully accepted member of his social world. Finally, while a violent and extremely painful death at the age of forty-two is no promise to live happily ever after, perishing at the moment of victory does fulfill this hero and his audience's own definition of a happy ending.

Unlike the virtuous adult of Locke, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft's dreams, actual human persons are never totally independent of each other. Alison Kafer remarks that the ideal of adulthood as absolute independence has a cost: "to eliminate disability is to eliminate the possibility of discovering alternative ways of being in the world, to foreclose the possibility of recognizing and valuing our interdependence" (83). This essay has focused on the meaning that Southey's Life had for its first audience, readers for whom Nelson was a contemporary public figure. In conclusion, I would like to suggest that it holds a different significance for readers today, for whom Nelson is historically distant. Katherine Ott, the Curator in the Division of Science and Medicine at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, remarks that whatever else they intend to show about the past, statues and exhibitions also teach lessons about what a human body ought to look like. And they usually feature one sort of body: an idealized one. "The history of public presentations of history goes hand-in-hand with representations of the human body," she points out, but the "healthy, idealized figures in exhibits, films, and reenactments are as false as the landscaped and manicured grounds of Civil War battlefields" (Ott 12). Even as they dramatize the body's violent destruction, representations of combat show their audience what a human body should look like and how it should function. Like such monuments and museums, stories about popular military figures are a form of "public history." Taking another look at Southey's Life of Nelson today is appropriate because whether or not people with physical impairments are seen to inhabit the past can affect an audience's sense of whether such people ought to inhabit the present, or the future.